We Should Have Rolled It Off A Cliff

Will she ever stop blogging? NO! She's procrastinating.

When the boyfriend's parents moved out of state, they left us their car. The boyfriend had just gotten his license (at the age of twenty-five), the Balabusta still can't drive.

The car, according to a friend who knows something about cars, is the worst model of car Ford ever made. He could be exaggerating. It's small, and old enough to be a couple of years past its bar mitzvah (if it's a girl, it's time to throw it a quinceaneara), and it ran pretty well for a couple of years.

Then things started getting bad. It began to require insane amounts of transistor fluid to go forward. It smoked. Since the boyfriend and the Balabusta mostly used it to go get groceries and *to go out of town to camp at SCA events*, its tendency to overheat when pushed over forty miles an an hour began to be a problem. One one notable occasion, the boyfriend pulled it off the road, clear across four (empty) lanes of freeway as the car urgently declared that a new pope hadn't been elected yet. Black smoke billowing everywhere. A couple of months later, we spent nearly ten hours getting it to go a couple of hundred miles. We would drive for ten miles, then sit and allow the car to rest, give it more transistor fluid, and try again.

On one of these rest stops:
Boyfriend: "Do you think we should get Triple-A?"
Balabusta: "I think we are currently starring in one of their advertisements, so yes. Maybe we can get a discount."

After that we never took it out of San Francisco at all, except for occasional late-night winter runs down El Camino Real where we could keep it under forty MPH and chilly.

Then the boyfriend bought himself a nice secondhand van, and the car sat in our driveway, and leaked, until we decided to move and realized that we couldn't take it with us.

Somehow getting rid of it turned out to be the Balabusta's problem. After some hunting online I found a place that did car donations, and would give the proceeds from the car to Hebrew Academy of San Francisco. I sent in the form on the fifteenth of June. A day later, I got a confirming e-mail back.

Then, on Wednesday, I got a cheerful call from the donation place asking if getting the car towed had gone okay.

I still hadn't heard from the towing place. When I called them, the number had been disconnected. I called the donation place. They said the number was fine. It turned out to be fine when I called again. (Yes, I'm getting sort of short-fused and distractable.)

I've spoken to the towing place now, and theoretically, they're going to call us back. I think we should have rolled it off a cliff. Unfortunately, the nearest good cliffs are at least five miles away, which makes getting the car to them impossible.

Boyfriend: "I just asked you to do it because I thought there might be some Jewish place you'd like to give it to. Me, I'd just have called PurpleHeart.org."

I may call them next. I considered Chabad, but figured it would take too long. (!!!) One thing's for sure, we can't take it WITH us.